Sergey Brin interviewed
29th March 2003
Jeremy Allaire has posted notes on an interview with Sergey Brin of Google, conducted at the PC Forum conference. Some highlights:
When or will you go IPO?
I was really impressed with his answer on this. He understands the incredible distraction that an IPO can be both for the management team and employees. He says it comes down to the fact that he’s just too lazy (which is clearly not the case!). The essence is a moral response --- public markets are too short-term focused and he wants his team focused on the long-run. Whatever the case, he admits that ultimately their employees and investors want liquidity and that will have to happen through an IPO or acquisition of Google.
A person in the audience asked a very interesting question -- idea -- about Google playing a leading role in enabling the semantic web. The basic idea was that Google should process pages and classify them into ontologies, and that they can derive lots of linked ontologies from all the content they already index.
He basically said he doesn’t believe in the semantic web as a set of linked RDF data-structures. His basic argument is that the structure of natural language and what it presents is much much richer than meta-data tagging schemes. Clearly, Google’s understanding of natural language is unique, but there still is a need for machine readable APIs for data on the Internet.
More recent articles
- Datasette Enrichments: a new plugin framework for augmenting your data - 1st December 2023
- llamafile is the new best way to run a LLM on your own computer - 29th November 2023
- Prompt injection explained, November 2023 edition - 27th November 2023
- I'm on the Newsroom Robots podcast, with thoughts on the OpenAI board - 25th November 2023
- Weeknotes: DevDay, GitHub Universe, OpenAI chaos - 22nd November 2023
- Deciphering clues in a news article to understand how it was reported - 22nd November 2023
- Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat? - 15th November 2023
- Financial sustainability for open source projects at GitHub Universe - 10th November 2023
- ospeak: a CLI tool for speaking text in the terminal via OpenAI - 7th November 2023
- DALL-E 3, GPT4All, PMTiles, sqlite-migrate, datasette-edit-schema - 30th October 2023